Dan's Papers -November 21, 2008 - Bathrooms - Men & Women Achieve Equality Where It's Never Talked About

Last Saturday morning at about 10 a.m., I was in the ladies room that is just next to the counter at Danny's Poxabogue Café in Sagaponack. Danny's is a very popular place for breakfast on the weekends and this Saturday was no exception.

I was in there for a while when I heard somebody rattling on the door. This is always a disconcerting experience. I had locked it behind me. I hoped it would hold. I didn't want some stranger walking in on me. It held.

A minute or two later, the rattling of the door came again. And this time, I did what I always do under those circumstances. I said in the deepest, most powerful voice I could muster, "I'm in here!!" They might be big men, but I was bigger. They should get the hell away from there until I came out.

After I did this, I had second thoughts. I am, after all, a man. The men's room was in use and the ladies' room wasn't. So I was using the ladies'. Whoever was out there, chances were, was female. I thought - maybe I should have spoken in a high squeaky voice. That might have been better.

A few minutes later, I washed up, opened the door and looked directly into the astonished eyes of a slender woman of about 50, who could not have been more than five foot one. I marched off taking big steps.

It has occurred to me that bathrooms in public places have undergone a cosmic shift in recent years, a shift that has largely gone unnoticed. I hereby notice it.

I was an undergraduate English major in the early '60s, and, for my senior thesis, I did a 60-page study on the meaning of the graffiti posted on bathroom walls. It was limited, back then, to the graffiti on the bathroom walls of men's rooms of course. I had never been in a ladies' bathroom and I saw no prospect of ever being in one.

I had seen ladies' rooms in the movies of course. They were fabulous places, all tidy and neat, with splendid mirrors and washbasins. You never saw a stall in those movies. And for the most part, these ladies' rooms were in restaurants where, first, one of the women would go to "wash up" and then a second woman would follow to talk about what was and wasn't going on between them and the men who had taken them out to dinner.

The men's rooms, by contrast, were a combination of filth, bad smells and graffiti marked on stalls, sometimes both inside and out. Sometimes they were in pen. Sometimes they had been scratched through the paint. They'd be about a particular woman, or a statement of intentions about women in general, or some insult or degrading remark aimed at Tony or Fred or somebody. All would be accompanied by very bad line drawings, usually of human genitalia in various states of arousal. They were indeed worthy of a senior thesis. Indeed, since my teacher was a woman, I thought this academic exercise would knock her socks off, since it would be about something she had never seen before. Of course, I did edit the work. No sense getting myself in trouble over this.

You have no idea how impossibly shameful it would be for me as a man to walk into a ladies' room back then. It might happen by accident. Women would scream. I'd rush out. Sorry, sorry.

Men at that time put their women up on pedestals. They were princesses and queens. They couldn't run or throw. Or if they did, it was "like a girl." We needed to protect them. Lift heavy things for them. Hold the doors open for them. Make sure everything was okay with them. None of my friends were even sure, at least up until we personally found out, usually in the back seat of a car, if women did what we did in bathrooms or even how they might do that.

At dances or sports events, you'd see long lines of women waiting to use the ladies' room when the event was over. We men just went in and out. Whatever it was they did in there took time. We did know they could not use urinals. We knew that much.

The change in the bathroom situations in public places came almost unnoticed as times changed.

It began when the powers that be - men - began to take seriously the claim by women that when architects designed buildings, they made the same number of places for women to go to the bathroom as men. And it wasn't fair, given that they took longer.

Newer buildings do have more places for women to go, I believe, but it remains true that the vast majority of buildings are from an earlier time - including Danny's Poxabogue Café - which still has the same men's room and ladies' room signs out front that they did 50 years ago.

Today, you see lots of places that make no distinction whatsoever between the sexes. Where new restaurants come in and take over a place where the plumbing allowed one toilet in the men's room and one toilet in the women's room and lock the door, the owners simply changed the rules about who could use them. All are marked WC for water closet. Go in, use it, leave.

This seems to say, well, we are all family, we are all friends, we are all one. Let's all treat each other that way.

As for the rest, there has now become a common rule that if the bathroom of your sex is in use, you can try the bathroom of the other sex if you can't wait and if it's free. Total strangers are asked to serve as lookouts. And they do. Even if it's a woman and a man going in. It works fine.

And the filthy public bathrooms of yore are gone. And the graffiti is gone.

Personally, I think that some men, maybe of the older generation like me, thought that if our men's rooms were going to sometimes be used by women, then by god, we ought to make them nice for them.

It's uplifted the whole experience. It's good for us men, too. And, of course, it's just much better sanitation and health.